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Dear Internet Archive Community,
I’ll get right to it: please support the Internet Archive today. Right now, we have a 2-to-1 Matching Gift Campaign, so you can triple your impact, but time is running out!The average donation is $45. If everyone reading this chips in just $5, we can keep this website going for free, and free of ads. That's right, all we need is the price of a paperback book to sustain a non-profit website the whole world depends on. For 23 years this has been my dream: for a generation of learners who turn to their screens for answers, I want to put the very best information at their fingertips. We stand with Wikipedians, librarians and creators to provide enduring access to the world’s most trustworthy knowledge. We’re dedicated to reader privacy so we never track you. We don’t accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers and staff. The Internet Archive is a bargain, but we need your help. If you find our site useful, we ask you humbly, please chip in. Thank you.
—Brewster Kahle, Founder, Internet Archive
Donor challenge:
Your donation will be matched 2-to-1 right now. Your $5 gift becomes $15!
Dear Internet Archive Community,
I’ll get right to it: please support the Internet Archive today. Right now, we have a 2-to-1 Matching Gift Campaign, so you can triple your impact, but time is running out!The average donation is $45. If everyone reading this chips in just $5, we can keep this website going for free, and free of ads. That's right, all we need is the price of a paperback book to sustain a non-profit website the whole world depends on. For 23 years this has been my dream: for a generation of learners who turn to their screens for answers, I want to put the very best information at their fingertips. We stand with Wikipedians, librarians and creators to provide enduring access to the world’s most trustworthy knowledge. We’re dedicated to reader privacy so we never track you. We don’t accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers and staff. The Internet Archive is a bargain, but we need your help. If you find our site useful, we ask you humbly, please chip in. Thank you.
—Brewster Kahle, Founder, Internet Archive
Donor challenge:
Your donation will be matched 2-to-1 right now. Your $5 gift becomes $15!
Dear Internet Archive Community,
I’ll get right to it: please support the Internet Archive today. Right now, we have a 2-to-1 Matching Gift Campaign, so you can triple your impact, but time is running out!The average donation is $45. If everyone reading this chips in just $5, we can keep this website going for free, and free of ads. That's right, all we need is the price of a paperback book to sustain a non-profit website the whole world depends on. For 23 years this has been my dream: for a generation of learners who turn to their screens for answers, I want to put the very best information at their fingertips. We’re dedicated to reader privacy so we never track you. We don’t accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers and staff. If you find our site useful, we ask you humbly, please chip in. Thank you.
—Brewster Kahle, Founder, Internet Archive
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The Histories of Herodotus is considered one of the seminal works of history in Western literature. Written from the 450s to the 420s BC in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, The Histories serves as a record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various cultures that were known around the Mediterranean and Western Asia at that time. It is not an impartial record but it remains one of the West's most important sources regarding these affairs. Moreover, it established without precedent the genre and study of history in the Western world, although historical records and chronicles existed beforehand.
Perhaps most importantly, it stands as one of the first, and surviving, accounts of the rise of the Persian Empire, the events of, and causes for, the Greco-Persian Wars between the Achaemenid Empire and the Greek city-states in the 5th century BC. Herodotus portrays the conflict as one between the forces of slavery (the Persians) on the one hand, and freedom (the Athenians and the confederacy of Greek city-states which united against the invaders) on the other.
The Histories was at some point through the ages divided into the nine books of modern editions, conventionally named after the Muses.
Herodotus seems to have traveled extensively around the ancient world, conducting interviews and collecting stories for his book. At the beginning of The Histories, Herodotus sets out his reasons for writing it:
"This is the showing-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that neither what has come to be from man in time might become faded, nor that great and wondrous deeds, those shown forth by Greeks and those by barbarians, might be without their glory; and together with all this, also through what cause they warred with each other."